A middleware agnostic infrastructure for neuro-imaging analysis

Large-scale neuroscience research projects are necessary in order to make significant progress in the study of degenerative brain diseases. At present the effectiveness of such efforts is being somewhat restricted by the absence of specifically tailored computing infrastructures. The neuGRID project aims to address this through the provision of a high-level service oriented infrastructure that enables complex neuro-science research. One of the principle aims of this work is to develop portable services that can be re-used in a larger set of related medical applications to access distributed computing resources. These services will provide high-level functionality that will support workflow authoring and planning, provenance storage and retrieval, querying against heterogeneous data sources as well as security and data anonymization amongst others. This paper introduces the neuGRID service architecture and outlines the design of two specific services, namely the Pipeline Service and the Glueing Service. A proof of concept implementation to evaluate the neuGRID design approach has been developed.